Online Assessment of Morphological Awareness in Grades 2–4: Its Development and Relation to Reading Comprehension

Abstract

The aims of the study are to construct an online instrument to assess different aspects of morphological awareness and to examine its development and its relation to reading comprehension in grades 2–4 in Hungarian children. Altogether, 4134 students were tested. The online test evaluated inflectional, derivational, and compound morphological skills with five subtests. The instrument proved to be reliable. CFA examinations revealed that the five subtests were empirically distinguishable dimensions. Inflectional, derivational, and compound morphology as the three main dimensions of morphological awareness were also empirically supported by our data. Morphological awareness skills improved significantly and developed in parallel with reading skills throughout grades 2–4. The increase in the development of morphological awareness from grade 2 to grade 3 tends to be faster than the growth between grade 3 and 4. Positive moderate correlations were found between morphological skills and reading comprehension and the relationships seem to be stable throughout the three grades. The most significant predictor of reading comprehension is the Affix Identification for Nonwords subtest. Our study showed that morphological awareness could be assessed efficiently through online media and drew attention to the importance of morphological awareness in the development of reading comprehension and linguistic intelligence.

Assessing Handwriting Skills in a Web Browser: Development and Validation of an Automated Online Test in Japanese Kanji

“…In recent years, online assessments of children's language and literacy skills, such as vocabulary knowledge and word reading, have become increasingly prevalent in research and practice in psychology, education, and speech-language pathology (e.g., Hautala et al, 2020;Hoskins et al, 2021;Manning et al, 2020;Varga et al, 2022;Yeatman et al, 2021). Several online screening tools for language and literacy difficulties (e.g., dyslexia, developmental language disorder) have also appeared (Asselborn et al, 2018;Guinet & Kander, 2010;Hulme et al, 2024;Hurford & Wines, 2021;Zugarramurdi et al, 2022), and this trend seems to be accelerating in response to the COVID pandemic worldwide (Antoniou et al, 2022;Castilla-Earls et al, 2022;Ho et al, 2023).…”